Groups of Companies

Location: Settings > Companies and Organization > Groups of Companies

Company groups enable multi-level grouping of companies entered in the application. Company groups are intended for large-scale environments. These are for example, ASP environments, accounting companies, and municipal federations. The introduction of company groups is always agreed upon in the implementation phase. A user can enter the Groups of Companies page if the "Groups of Companies" option has been enabled in his/her profile and his/her user level is "Administrator".

Company Group Data

Company Group Name

When archiving Banking materials, it is possible to target the archived material to the respective company group company on the basis of the company group name. Such company group based targeting may be necessary in such environments where several companies are simultaneously included in various company groups with the same accounting code, and where materials from various separate Banking systems or Banking customer resources are archived. In such cases, the company group name is defined for Banking under System Name in Basic Data > Settings > General Settings > Archiving. The company group's name should be entered in the exact same way in both applications (capitalization taken into account).

Unique ID

You can enter an identifier that uniquely identifies the customer relationship in the Unique ID field for the group of companies. The identifier is used in ASP environments for invoicing purposes, for example.

A user can change the Unique ID setting if he/she has system-level company rights.

Partner ID

In ASP environments, you can change the appearance of the application to better suit the visual look of a partner. It is also possible to implement an appearance change, i.e. branding, only for the desired group of companies, in which case the unique ID of the partner is specified in the Partner ID field. Additional information on branding is available from the supplier of the application.

A user can change the Partner ID setting if he/she has system-level company rights.

Adding Companies to Company Groups

It is advisable to include a company in a company group before entering the company in the application. The company group specific settings are applied to the company after it has been entered into a company group, provided that no settings have been defined for the company level. If no settings have been defined for the company group either, the required settings are retrieved from a structurally higher unit.

If the General level structure has been applied on the entered company and a posting structure has been defined for the group settings level, the group posting structure is applied on the company after it has been included in the group. This means that the General level posting dimension fields, which may have been applied in posting prior to including the company in the group, are not displayed in the archive posting search results anymore.
Other settings which should be considered are, for example, archived transaction types, archive settings, posting dimension values, payment systems, expense types, workflow settings, and workflow steps. User profile access rights should also be verified for workflow steps. If the company adopts new workflow steps, it is not possible to perform archive searches with the General level steps anymore.

Removing a Company from a Company Group

Removing a company from a company group means that the company is transferred to the General level. With this operation, the company group settings level information and settings are copied to the company's settings level – provided that the company has attempted to apply company group settings. If the company has applied the General level settings, these are applied after the transfer, too. The following data will be copied from the group of companies to the company level if it was defined for the group of companies and used by the company before it was removed from the group of companies: archive transaction types, archive settings and archiving delays, posting structure, chart of accounts, voucher types, posting dimension values, supplier list, workflow steps, payment systems, expense types, product groups and requisition settings.

Note: The source directories of the copied transactions will change in connection with the copying of archive transaction types to the company level. The changing of source directories must also be taken into account in the external system that creates the archived materials so it can create the materials to the new source directories in the future.

If a company is included in another company group later on, the suitability of company's settings should be verified.

Defining Data Source Settings for the Company Group

The application may be linked to a number of separate Banking systems or Banking customer resources. Under Data Sources in the Company Groups function, a database connection to Banking is defined for company group companies. The Banking customer relationship name is entered in the Customer Relationship field while defining the data source for the Banking customer base. The administrator for the whole Banking system and his/her respective password – not the username and password of the customer relationships administrator – are entered in the Banking Administrator field.